Stop Global Whining

Yesterday’s post on an LATimes story about the Amazon becoming a source of pollution and global warming was in error, due to my rushed reading of the piece. Thanks to Jim for pointing it out, and apologies for the error.

But mine wasn’t the only error; the article itself was full of them.

Problem One: The article said

Official figures show that, on average, 7,500 square miles of rain forest were chopped and burned down in Brazil every year between 1979 and 2004. Over the 25 years, it's as if a forest the size of California had disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Actually, if true that number would be almost two Californias, not one. California is about 100 million square miles; 7,500 square miles a year for 25 years comes to 187,500,000 square miles. Oops. How many editors do you suppose didn’t bother to check the math in their haste to rush out an anti-farmer, anti-timber story?

But think that through. If timber and farming interests had cleared that much space in just 25 years, wouldn’t Brazilian timber and farm production be the largest on earth, or near it? It’s fourth in timber, doing pretty well, but produces less than half of India’s production. I wonder why we don’t hear of huge fires in India.

Agricultural output is harder to track because rankings are generally posted by crop type, not aggregated. I'm not seeing a lot of "product of Brazil" sickers on my fruits and veggies, though.

I don't believe the 7,500 square mile figure. It is probably the result of a flawed computer model, not on-the-ground calculations, just as the "species extinction crisis" is the result of a flawed computer model.

Problem Two: The article admits that the fires occur during the dry season, but provides no statistics on natural or accidental fires, leaving the reader to assume that all Brazilian forest fires are started deliberately by man for (gasp!) capitalistic purposes.

Here’s a BBC story from 1999 that shows that not all fires are agriculture or timber related:

Near the mountain resort of Petropolis, near Rio, scores of firefighters battled a blaze in the Serra dos Orgaos National Park.

By Wednesday, the blaze had destroyed 175 acres of parkland, including pristine tracts of Atlantic forest.

In the southern state of Parana, fire ravaged more than 125,000 acres of the Ilha Grande National Park on its border with Mato Grosso do Sul.

Is there no lightening in Brazil? Do sparks never fly from cooking fires and accidentally start a fire? The LAT, like the environmental movement, leads readers to assume that all fires in Brazil are from slash-and-burn agricultural methods. It’s just not logical.

Problem Three: The article wants us to believe that every fire is a sign of rainforest disappearing. Again, not true. Many of the fires are from farmers burning stalks and branches that are the waste product of long-established fields. This is the largest cause of air pollution in California’s Central Valley, by the way.

Problem Four: Even if all the if's were true, the soil is not left barren and fallow, it is replanted with something called crops, and these crops process carbon dioxide into oxygen. Enviros will moan that it's not the same, but even if we accept that fields are not forests, there are findings that agricultural crops do the carbon-di0xide-into-oxygen thing more efficiently than forests.

So ... yesterday I said the LAT is known for weepy environmental reporting. It's still true.